THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, February 6, 1995 TAG: 9502060073
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY FRANCIE LATOUR, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WILLIAMSBURG LENGTH: Long : 110 lines
At a weekend retreat here, the Chesapeake City Council embraced a new plan it said would finally put teeth in a document created five years ago to manage growth in the city.
Council members unanimously supported a plan to replace the vague guidelines of its 1990 comprehensive plan with technical standards to measure levels of key services provided by the city - schools, roads and sewer lines. The plan would severely restrict any rezoning request in areas where those services are at or approaching maximum limits.
One restriction would allow the council to automatically deny rezoning if the area schools are overcrowded by 20 percent.
Another restriction would permit denial if nearby roads drop below a certain grade, based on a new grading system for the city's major roads.
Those kinds of limits are essential if the city is to begin taking control of its explosive growth rather than be controlled by it, city officials said.
``No one wants to stop growth,'' said City Manager James W. Rein. ``What this policy is doing is asking, where is the growth going to be? How are you going to organize it? How are you going to channel it, and what are you going to channel it away from? This is about orderliness.''
For three days, the council and a few staff members traded in the disorder of suburban sprawl for a more serene view of wooded trails and narrow, sloping waterfalls. They not only left their pin-striped suits for jogging suits and wool sweaters, but also set aside partisan wrangling as they huddled around a table for hours at a time.
Though secluded from the sight of portable classroom trailers and the sound of rush-hour traffic along Battlefield Boulevard, council members said they could not ignore the hard numbers that have marked Chesapeake as the fastest-growing city in the state:
The city's population has jumped from 114,000 to 180,000 in the past 15 years.
City officials plan to borrow $100 million for school construction this year, topping its record of $76 million for road improvements approved by referendum in November.
There are 6,000 acres of residentially zoned land that developers could start building on tomorrow, about 23,000 new homes the city would have no choice but to absorb.
It is not the first time council members have heard these figures; they rattled off one statistic after another during the four-hour session.
It is also not the first time council members pledged to draw the line and manage the growth they continually decry.
They acknowledged those mistakes as readily as they repeated the numbers.
``What we've done on council is responded piecemeal, using different criteria on one rezoning after another,'' said Councilman John M. de Triquet. ``But now, with this document, what we are saying is we have to take the full spectrum of considerations into account: Is (the development) timely? Are the schools there? What levels are the roads at?
``We can't just use the criteria we want to use. We have to use all the criteria all the time for every application.''
The call for strict guidelines came as council members also realized the limited cooperation they can expect from the state and developers: Heavy lobbying by builders last week helped kill a state bill that would have allowed Chesapeake to impose fees on developers for every new home.
``I left that committee thinking, we're pretty much on our own,'' said Vice Mayor Arthur L. Dwyer. ``If we don't do something about this growth, no one will.''
Dwyer said he was stunned by the state's advice to rely on voluntary offers by developers to offset infrastructure costs. Since 1988, Chesapeake has encouraged such offers in exchange for granting rezonings.
But a separate state subcommittee is already investigating Chesapeake and seven other municipalities for its use of such exchanges.
``The only option we have now,'' Dwyer said, ``is to reduce the inventory (of already zoned land) as quickly as possible so we can get control of our city.''
In order to gain that control, council members asked the city manager, planning director and city attorney to give them a weapon that would curb development to the maximum extent the law will allow. In revisiting the comprehensive plan, those department heads realized the document already contained many of the solutions.
The problem, they said, was in the lack of detail and the neglect of certain crucial parts of the plan.
``You can't just look at one piece of the equation,'' Rein said, pointing to the city's land use map. Too often, Rein said, developers expect approval on rezonings based exclusively on whether or not their proposals agree with the land use map.
But the timeliness of the development has to be a factor.
``This colored map tells us how we want the city to look, that's true,'' Rein said. ``But it's how we want it to look in 2010. Maybe we're not ready for it to look like that now, and the city needs to be willing to say that.''
In the past, city planners have been unable to effectively gauge when the city would be ready and how much development is too much.
Now, said Planning Director Brent R. Nielson, new information released by the Chesapeake School Administration and the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission will give the city a consistent standard to judge a rezoning based on its impact on the surrounding area.
The data identifies and keeps track of how many students are in each school, and grades all major roads in the city on a scale of A to F.
Council members haven't adopted the plan, since no laws can be made during a retreat. The proposal will go to the Planning Commission with the stipulation that it return to the council floor for a vote within six weeks.
The council asked staff members to set up workshops with the commissioners beforehand to avoid any confusion or delays when the board formally considers the plan.
KEYWORDS: CHESAPEAKE CITY COUNCIL GROWTH DEVELOPMENT by CNB